The plain, wood framed, vernacular style, residential cottage sitting upon the lot at 275 Thames Street, London, Ontario, was slated for demolition to make way for an expansion of the Aboutown Travel Services parking facilities. After the request for demolition was approved, groups of concerned and aware citizens began protesting and combating the order because they remembered the history associated with the structure; they remembered the building as the Fugitive Slave Chapel.

History of the Slave Chapel

The area surrounding London has an important, if often forgotten, association with 19th century Black heritage in North America. As one of the terminus points on the Underground Railroad, the population of former slaves was increasing during the early nineteenth century. As such, there are numerous points of local history, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, near Dresden, as well as communities, like the former settlements of Wilberforce, near Lucan, and Buxton, near Chatham. The first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (referred to as the Fugitive Slave Chapel) in London, Ontario was one of these focal points.

275 Thames Street c.1926

The AME Church was built in the area known as the Fork of the Thames in 1847 to service a settlement of Black refugees who lived on the south side of the Thames River. The AME Church purchased the lot through a board of trustees from William Clark, a carpenter who obtained the original deed for the lot. The church was renamed the British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 to reinforce its commitment to the British Crown. In 1869, a new church building was erected at 430 Grey Street, which is the location of the current Beth Emanuel Church, and the property containing the original AME Church was sold to James Seale. The church building at 275 Thames Street remained on the lot and became a residential property. It was long assumed that the original structure was demolished; however, E.J. Carty, a reporter for The London Advertiser (1864-1936), was able to confirm that the structure at 275 Thames Street was the original structure.

During its tenure at 275 Thames Street, the AME Church was visited by several notable people, including John Brown, who spoke to a delegation here advocating revolution and what would transpire as the raid on Harper’s Ferry. In 1986, the London Historic Sites Committee recognized the AME Church as a site of historic and cultural importance in London, and erected a plaque on the building.

Public Excavations

The public outcry concerning the demolition of the building was enough to get a 60 day stay of demolition to properly document the cultural and archaeological heritage of the property. In this time, Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants Inc. (TMHC) offered its services to conduct the archaeological assessments. While the City of London financed some portions of the archaeological assessment, much of the personnel, time, and resources was supplied by TMHC, volunteers from the Ontario Archaeological Society and the general public, who helped to make this project a success.

Volunteers conducting excavations at the site.

The excavations were conducted during weekends and included mapping the property, the excavation of test pits, the excavation of one-meter units, and the mapping and excavation of identified features. Given the time constraints placed on the project by the imminent demolition, the outpouring of public volunteers formed the backbone of this project and helped complete our archaeological assessment before the deadline.

A total of 41 units were excavated in the roughly 20 meters by 15 meters area behind the standing structures. The archaeological work uncovered a variety of domestic artifacts that included ceramics, glassware, iron objects, and modern refuse. The majority of the artifacts examined to date have been associated with the later 19th/early 20th century habitation of the site. A total of eight potential cultural features were identified and excavated; one of which may have been a grey water pit and the rest were likely small refuse pits.

Where are we now?

At the time of writing, the majority of fieldwork has been completed and volunteers have completed the processing of artifacts, with cataloging and analysis to follow. There are plans to conduct additional mechanical topsoil stripping behind the house to look for additional features. During the investigation process, the demolition plans for the building were put on hold to allow for the potential relocation of the structure to a new home.

275 Thames Street in 2013

The Fugitive Slave Chapel Preservation Projectorganizers are presently trying to raise funds (approximately $160,000) to relocate the Fugitive Slave Chapel structure to an empty lot adjacent to the Beth Emanuel Church on Grey Street. Once relocated, the Fugitive Slave Chapel will require at least $500,000 to renovate and repurpose it as a community center that will offer meals, counseling, and educational programs, as well as being a museum and focal point of Black history in London. Until now the Fugitive Slave Chapel Preservation Project has had moderate successes at raising the initial relocation funds from public donations through efforts such as their ‘2¢ Worth’ campaign; however, they will continue to require further donations to make their vision to preserve the Fugitive Slave Chapel a success. The revitalized role of Fugitive Slave Chapel continues to have tremendous potential to be a focal point of Black heritage in the area, as well as serving members of the London community in need.

This project helped emphasize the importance of archaeology to help communities remember, as well as the role we have in helping preserve, forgotten pasts; however, this was not a one-sided relationship. The public played a vital role in the implementation, excavation, and conservation of this project and it would not have been possible without their interest and support. While this project was not without its difficulties, as with any project, it shows that CRM archaeology and public engagement can work together to conduct archaeology that is significant to local communities.

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As a professional organization, the Society for Historical Archaeology promotes the participation of student members and supports the advancement of their careers. Students, in turn, may see the SHA as a resource in their professional development. One way the SHA encourages student participation in the annual meeting is through the Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Award, discussed on the SHA blog by both Paul Mullins and Charlie Ewen. Graduate students may apply for the $500 award to defray the cost of travel when presenting research at the annual conference.

What kind of students and research win the award? Mullins concisely described the work of last year’s two recipients and we were curious to learn a little more about Corey McQuinn and Adrian Myers as students. We interviewed McQuinn and Myers and the following is a summary of their responses.

Corey McQuinn, a master’s student concentrating in Historical Archaeology at the University of Albany, researches enslavement in the Northeast, an understudied topic. He examines the Mabee Farm in Rotterdam, New York, and how different archaeological models of enslavement and racialization apply to the Northern context. Through another project focused on the Underground Railroad in Albany, New York, he studies how the construction of a community that supported the Underground Railroad relates to New York’s earlier history as a slave state and its continued economic dependence on enslaved labor corps.

McQuinn working with students at the Schoharie River Center archeological field school in Montgomery County, New York. Dragon site on the Schoharie Creek (2008).

In addition to this academic research, as a project manager for the cultural resource management firm Hartgen Archaeological Associates, Inc., McQuinn says he must be flexible and cover a broad range of time periods and historic contexts. He has worked in a variety of historical contexts, including cemetery excavations, tavern sites, Shaker village sites, farmsteads and industrial contexts. He has also helped to run Hartgren’s youth archaeological field school summer programs, getting students involved in community archaeology.

McQuinn and students screening at Stephen and Harriet Myers house youth field school in Albany, New York, last summer.

The Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award helped McQuinn attend his first SHA conference, where he presented a paper, met other professionals in his field, including authors of papers and books he has read. A highlight of the conference was getting to know people and learning about work in progress. He finds both the annual conference and quarterly newsletter valuable resources for identifying potential partnerships and opportunities in the future.

Though his three kids, Remember, Beatrix, and Jasper, are his greatest successes, McQuinn also received the New York Archaeological Association’s William Beauchamp Student Award in 1998 and the 1997-1998 Dana Student Internship Grant from Ithaca College. He is looking forward to completing his master’s thesis next semester and his PhD in the future.

Myers excavating at the PoW camp in Manitoba.

A PhD candidate at Stanford, Adrian Myers, learned of the Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award through attending the SHA conference, SHA business meetings, and from the HISTARCH email listserv. The award enabled him to present a paper, “Dominant Narratives, Popular, Assumptions, and Radical Reversals in the Archaeology of German Prisoners of War in a Canadian National Park” in the session chaired by Michael Roller and Paul Shackel, “Reversing the Narrative.” The paper was about all the surprising and counterintuitive things he encountered while studying the history of Nazi soldiers in a prison camp in Canada during World War II. Long interested in the history of the Second World War, his dissertation research is a historical archaeological study of a prison camp in Manitoba, Canada. Over three seasons of work he and colleagues surveyed, mapped, and excavated portions of the camp. Myers also travelled to Germany and met with three men who had been prisoners of the camp.

Also a recipient of the National Geographic Society Waitt Grant (2009), Myers suggests undergraduate students pursue ideas for projects, even if it seems impossible and incredibly far off, especially if they are passionate about the subject. He suggests finding a supportive graduate program and, with effort the research can probably be done. He also says having an awesome adviser helps.

Both McQuinn and Myers sound passionate about their research and actively pursue opportunities to participate in projects and make connections with their peers in historical archaeology. They recognize the SHA as a resource for students and advise them to participate in the organization by speaking or corresponding with other archaeologists and presenting at conferences. The Academic and Professional Training Student Subcommittee (SSC) is starting a group discussion on student professionalism and the Society for Historical Archaeology. Please become a member of the conversation by joining the SSC Yahoo! group. Email your request to JCoplin@gc.cuny.edu and include your email to join.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org/) provides standardized artifact, contextual, spatial, and image data from excavated sites of slavery throughout the early modern Atlantic World. Currently, DAACS is the largest archive, paper or digital, of standardized archaeological data related to slavery and slave societies. We have built it, with grant funds, generous data sharing, and intellectual input of more than 50 collaborating archaeologists and historians. For over ten years, these scholars and many others have contributed to DAACS’ overarching goal: to facilitate the comparative archaeological study of the spatial and temporal variation in slavery and the archaeological record by providing standardized archaeological data from multiple archaeological sites that were once homes to enslaved Africans.

DAACS strives to achieve this goal by giving researchers access to detailed standardized archaeological data in a format that allows the assemblages to be seamlessly compared quantitatively without any additional processing by the researcher. We do so by physically reanalyzing the assemblages, and their associated contexts, to the same classification and measurement protocols that were established with the help of the DAACS Steering Committee in 2000. This is the critical aspect of the DAACS program—providing the standardized data that are essential to any comparative archaeological study.

DAACS data are stored in a massive relational Structured Query Language (SQL) database and are delivered over the internet via the DAACS website. The website debuted in 2004 with complete data sets from 15 domestic slave sites in Virginia. They were made available then, as they are today, through an easy-to-use, point-and-click query interface. By the end of 2012, DAACS will contain complete archaeological datasets, including data on over 2 million artifacts, from sixty sites of slavery in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Jamaica, Nevis, and St. Kitts.

During the past year, over 10,000 unique visitors have landed on the DAACS website. Many DAACS users go straight for the Archive’s meta-data: the section of the website that contains information on the DAACS data structures and authority terms, DAACS cataloging manuals and stylistic element guides, and research papers and posters. Others spend time browsing and reading through the archaeological sites pages, the text-heavy portion of the DAACS website that provides extensive background data on each site, site chronologies, access to images and maps, and bibliographies. We consider these pages essential to anyone using the archaeological data accessible through the DAACS Query Module.

Visitors often move from the background pages to the DAACS Query Module, which provides access to standardized data on hundreds-of-thousands of artifacts and archaeological contexts. The query interface masks a complex set of queries to the relational database that contains the raw archaeological data from all sites in the Archive. Queried data are returned and made available to users through the web browser and through downloadable ASCII files that can easily be imported into the user’s favorite statistical package.

DAACS is explicitly and clearly designed for large-scale comparative archaeological research. The website features—the Query Module, Archaeological Sites Pages, and corresponding meta-data—are critical to meeting the goals of the project.

In the evolving ecology of accessible digital data, digital archives vary in the extent to which they are designed to facilitate comparative research versus the extent to which they facilitate and make possible the preservation of archaeological data. These elements of online archives and databases are not mutually exclusive; many research archives preserve data and preservation archives encourage research. Projects such as tDAR (The Digital Archaeological Record) and ADS (Archaeological Data Service) are essential to the preservation of born-digital data generated by individual researchers. These critical resources preserve and make searchable data from any type of archaeological project, regardless of region or time period. Data from projects range from digital reports and basic finds lists to full-blown archaeological databases. However, there are comparability problems, to the extent that the contributing researchers use different classification and measurement protocols.

To date, research archives have focused on specific regions and time periods in order to provide datasets that enable researchers to address synthetic research questions. Examples include the Chaco Research Archive, A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture, and DAACS. These projects provide a venue in which protocols that work well in particular times and places encourage individual researchers to think seriously about how to ensure their data plays well with others’ data, making it easier to researchers to glimpse the fruits of comparative analysis that shared protocols make possible.

But each archive type requires specific tradeoffs. For research archives making comparative quantitative research easy requires standardization. However, it is not clear how, over the long-term, the requisite standardization will emerge. Sites like DAACS may be one way forward. No matter where one sits on the continuum, a firm commitment to open and transparent data sharing underpins all digital archiving projects.

The demand for archives that specialize in digital data preservation and accessibility will continue to grow as individuals, museums, universities, and the government grapple with archiving and making the large quantities of archaeological data they curate accessible. The success and growth of research archives that generate detailed comparable digital data accessible for the explicit research purposes will depend on how we meet the analytical needs of inquisitive archaeological researchers.

Over the past six years, we’ve seen a marked increase in the number of graduate students who approach us with the desire to pursue data-driven comparative research. Their questions and needs may be a bellwether for the development, use and longevity of research archives.

Our experience at DAACS is that undergraduate and graduate students are eager to engage in archaeological data analysis, both on the single site and comparative levels. They come to DAACS asking questions that require serious archaeological data analysis however many are missing two critical skills: the ability to link arguments about what happened in the past to archaeological variation and the skills in data analysis that allow them to summarize patterns in the data that speak to the arguments.

A concrete example is one related to chronology. Chronological control is the critical first analytical step in doing any archaeological study, whether at a single site or comparative analysis – you do not want to mistake temporal change for synchronic variation. Yet we have discovered that graduate students who have completed their coursework in Historical Archaeology do not know how to get started. From framing an argument to executing data retrieval, discovering patterns in the results, and linking those patterns back to the original argument we have discovered that most historical archaeology students come to us seeking advice on where and how to begin working with their data and the data in DAACS. An informal survey suggests that one reason is that only a handful of graduate programs that provide advanced degrees with specializations in historical archaeology require students to take even a single course in statistical methods.

But it is clear that students (and our colleagues) want more resources for learning how to work with these data. We receive regular requests to provide training in statistical analysis and to teach the more arcane analytical methods that we occasionally use but which are necessary to fully engage with the quantity of fine-grained data available through DAACS.

As the promise of using online databases for research has become increasingly obvious over the past five years, the demand for data has risen. It is how we meet the demand not only for the data but also for the analytical skills to make sense of the data that will determine the trajectory of online databases in the next 5 to 10 years.

While I worry about the trajectory of archaeological training, I remain sanguine about the promise of research archives in large part because I am lucky enough to work with graduate and undergraduate students engaging with DAACS’s online database, students who work doggedly to learn methods they were never taught, and who have come to realize that the data in DAACS are so rich that the hard work it takes to learn analytical approaches to their data provides big payoffs and exciting answers to previously unanswerable questions.

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